Speech
by Mr. Tadatoshi AKIBA, Mayor of Hiroshima and President of Mayors
for Peace
Foreign
Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, Brussels, Wednesday,
19 January 2005, 10.00 - 11.00
Mr.
Chairman, it is a great honour for me to speak here at your invitation
and attempt to do justice to the aspirations of the atomic bombing
survivors of my city.
To
the survivors, it is incomprehensible that the world continues to
accept the terror of the atomic bomb. The Cold War was a struggle
over the course of civilization, and the nuclear arms race put the
very survival of civilization on the line. In 2005, the Cold War
is long over, and yet a nuclear trance still holds sway in our minds.
How can we snap out of this trance and save ourselves before it
is too late?
Let
us be under no illusion. If we do not wake up and take decisive
action now, other cities will undoubtedly fall victim to nuclear
attack. We must change the course we are on, and I firmly believe
that Europe has an historic role to play in leading humanity toward
a nuclear-weapon-free future.
In
the struggle against nuclear weapons, true leadership flows from
pursuing the proper objective: abolition. “Leadership”
that excuses the double standard inherent in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty will never control proliferation. Today we are being buffeted
by a whirlwind arising from decades of neglect of the treaty’s
disarmament obligations. True leadership hungers for a nuclear-weapon-free
world. True leadership works tirelessly to overcome all obstacles.
True leadership does not quietly tolerate the nuclear threat.
What
prevents Europe from exercising true leadership?
The
European Union counts two nuclear-weapon states among its members.
Are these states providing leadership on nuclear disarmament? Of
course, the former and current nuclear superpowers have the lion’s
share of arms to disarm, but does that exonerate the lesser other
nuclear powers? You insist on waiting until U.S. and Russian levels
approach yours, but are you really pressing them to get there faster
and irreversibly? Or are you sheltering them from international
pressure to fulfil their obligations?
Most
members of the European Union are also members of NATO. Leaving
aside the larger question of why NATO did not go the way of the
Warsaw Pact, are you aware that NATO plans to rely on nuclear weapons
“for the foreseeable future?” Article VI of the NPT
does not call for nuclear disarmament after the foreseeable future.
How can NATO pursue in good faith a future it cannot even foresee?
Let’s be honest. The United States and NATO are refusing to
foresee a future without nuclear weapons, and theirs is not the
future we want. My impression is that this great parliament has
on several occasions, most recently last February, made it quite
clear that it prefers a nuclear-weapon-free future
Here
let me take a moment to express the gratitude of Hiroshima , Nagasaki
, the Mayors for Peace network, and disarmament campaigners the
world over for the encouragement you gave our campaign when it was
just getting up on its feet. Thanks to you, we can truly say that
the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki no longer stand alone. Mayors
for Peace had one of the largest NGO delegations at the Preparatory
Committee meeting last April. This coming May we intend to outdo
ourselves with a delegation of Mayors one hundred strong, accompanied
by an equal number of other city representatives. As we go forward,
the continued support of EU Parliamentarians means a great deal
to us.
Our
sincere desire is to create the political context for a diplomatic
breakthrough. The five-year horizon of the review process is crippling
the ability of the states parties to really tackle the non-proliferation/disarmament
challenge. A great edifice needs to be built, but the step-by-step
approach is like designing and building one floor at a time without
considering the next and having never considered the project as
a whole. No architect would endorse such an erratic approach. One
would have to wonder if the builder really cared about finishing
the job.
The
entire ‘construction project’ has to be, at the very
least, sketched out in advance, and everyone has to be working off
of the same drawings. When Mayors for Peace advances its 2020 Vision,
we are not attempting to force the world into some lockstep march
toward our vision of ‘nuclear disarmament.’ We say,
“Take five years, if you need it. Plan out the process, then
take twice that time to implement the plan.” We chose this
long timeframe so that no one could doubt that, given the requisite
political will, there would be no physical or economic impediments
to getting the job done on schedule. So it boils down to one question,
“Shall we begin?”
That
was the question the United States Conference of Mayors answered
so decisively last year. On the way here from Japan , I had a chance
to stop in Washington to thank the U.S. Mayors for the leadership
they have shown. I told them that around the world today, mayors
are endorsing the resolution they adopted and are thereby calling
on their own Heads of Government to, and I quote, “support
a decision by the 2005 NPT Review Conference to commence negotiations
on the elimination and prohibition of nuclear weapons and related
materials.” The US contingent of our one-hundred-strong international
delegation to New York will be led by the President of the U.S.
Conference of Mayors, my new, good friend, Donald Plusquellic, Mayor
of Akron, Ohio.
Membership
in Mayors for Peace is expanding rapidly around the world, but nowhere
more rapidly than in Europe . From 110 countries and regions, we
now have more than 700 city members, and EU countries account for
just under half the total. We intend to have one thousand members
by May.
Mr.
Chairman, European foreign and security policy should make it absolutely
clear that Europe wants nothing more than to liberate the world
from the tyranny and the insanity of the nuclear threat. You must
make it clear that Europe will always stand with those who are ready
to move effectively and comprehensively toward the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free
world. Ideally, European nations or the European Union as a whole
could do at the multilateral and international level what Mayors
for Peace is doing at the city and national level, recruiting and
campaigning actively to achieve that goal by 2020.
If
Europe wholeheartedly adopts such an attitude, there is not the
slightest doubt in my mind that it would find like-minded friends
everywhere. Your worthy efforts to stem nuclear proliferation would
meet with tremendous cooperation worldwide. If Europe affirms through
action the intended transitory nature of the NPT’s double
standard, you will make the decisive contribution to realizing the
only acceptable single standard: a world made up entirely of non-nuclear
weapon states.
Mr.
Chairman, the struggle to abolish nuclear weapons is the moral equivalent
of the 19th century struggle to abolish slavery. Our campaign is
not a partisan effort to gain political advantage for any human
subgroup. We are sincerely attempting to protect our children and
their children from experiences of horror and misery that only A-bomb
survivors can imagine. This august body has resolved to support
the campaign. Please resolve now, as some of the most powerful human
individuals on this planet, to do everything in your power to ensure
that your grandchildren and mine will think of nuclear weapons,
if they think of them at al l, as relics of a dark, barbaric past.
Thank
you very much for this opportunity to speak to the representatives
of European community.
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